President John Kennedy got his brains blown out 40 years ago today. That was a damned shame, but these things happen. If you whack one politician, there'll always be a hundred more to take their place, much like the smaller variety of cockroaches. C'est la vie.
We'll probably never know 100% for sure, but the best indication is that it was just what it initially appeared to be: one lone gunman. Theoretically, there could have been a bunch of people or groups conspiring together, but it's unlikely that numerous collaborators could have kept their mouths shut for these many decades- besides any other evidence that would have been discovered by the fine tooth combs of government, media and authors in these passing decades.
The most interesting thing about it now is the continuing cottage industry in arcane conspiracy theories. Despite the passage of decades, this one assassination continues to haunt the collective imagination with innumerable books, tv shows, and now websites spinning incredibly arcane JFK assassination conspiracies.
Why so much widespread public emotional involvement in a relatively minor historical event (minor compared to, say, any war or the civil rights movement)? I have a theory! (Oh no, not you too.)
As much as this ground has been plowed over, I'd have to guess someone has said something similar. Forgive me then if this doesn't strike you as incredibly original. I value truth over originality anyway:
The assassination of JFK by a lone gunman represents a total triumph of evil chaos that is difficult to accept. It is understandable and acceptable emotionally that some bad powerful rich dudes might be able to muster their resources to kill even a president. It's ugly, but you can wrap your mind around it, and imagine ways to fight it.
It is much harder to accept that one petty, low level dumbass like Oswald can change the course of history with 50 cents worth of bullets and a little luck. The president has all kinds of guards, and an unlimited budget for personal security. If all those officers and millions of dollars can't protect you from just one idiot with a rifle, then there's no security for any of us ever.
Article comments
1 - EKKK
I think JFK was killed by a wild panda bear that escaped from china and swam across the pacific ocean to get to Dallas and a drunk gun salesman, who sold the panda bear a gun and let the bear shot him numerous times from the grassy knoll
2 - Eric Olsen
I believe the Warren Commission considered and rejected that theory
3 - kurt
what an idiot. i mean seriously, a panda bear? everyone knows it was a grizzly.
4 - casey stanhope
i have three nipples.
5 - Al Barger
Congratulations Casey. How's that working out for you?
6 - Eric Berlin
Man, I love the Internet...
7 - Victor Plenty
You make some good points here, Mr. Barger. I'm not sure whether your concluding paragraph is written in earnest or in irony, though.
8 - Al Barger
Irony. Perhaps my writing wasn't clear. The last paragraph taken exactly straight would directly contradict the basic point of the essay. To put it differently, the last paragraph is an illustration of the point in paragraph #7, "It is much harder to accept..."
9 - Bob
to answer the question
"But what if it's just one guy with some moderate technical expertise, and no co-conspirators to rat him out? How do you stop that?"
its next to impossible in our current situation.
back when societies were highly segregated based on race, religion, culture, which baseball team you root for etc, it was pretty simple. You just removed everyone "not like you", on the assumption that nobody like you would wish you harm.
In todays society it is much harder. schools don't even try to teach a common culture but follow a "multicultural" model.
For any of you who are history buffs, compare modern America (& the west in general) With pre-collapse Rome &/or the Weimar republic (the German government that existed just prior to Hitlers rise.
Scary stuff
10 - gonzo marx
Bob above me sez..
*back when societies were highly segregated based on race, religion, culture, which baseball team you root for etc, it was pretty simple. You just removed everyone "not like you", on the assumption that nobody like you would wish you harm.
In todays society it is much harder. schools don't even try to teach a common culture but follow a "multicultural" model.
For any of you who are history buffs, compare modern America (& the west in general) With pre-collapse Rome &/or the Weimar republic (the German government that existed just prior to Hitlers rise.*
ok..so let me get this correct here..
are you Postulating that a mono-cultural approach is superior and/or you rpreference for a Society?
just curious..
Excelsior!
11 - Victor Plenty
Societies united by uniformity might better prevent attacks by internal enemies. However, the great advantage of a society united in its diversity lies in its greater resilience, its vigorous power to recuperate after any such attack.
That is where America's best hope for its future security remains. Building the unshakeable conviction that nobody, anywhere on Earth, is "not like me."
12 - Josh
LBJ did it end of story, he hired the mafia, who hired the communists, who hired oswald
13 - Johnny
yah lbj is at fault but the wild panda theory was tempting
14 - Leftwingrighty
I honestly think that the CIA did it because who knows secrecy better than them? Plus, pretty much every theory of just Oswald is based off of what the recreationists call "a (large) series of coincidences that have a 1/912384091820981 chance of all happening, insisting that "Well, it did..." When you think about it, everything that happened is well within the CIAs reach. It sounds nutty, but cmon, one guy? Yea its possible, but really now...Teh CIA CIACIACIA subliminal message conform consume obey. ahem what?
yea
15 - Al Barger
LWR, you think the CIA is good at keeping secrets?
16 - Randy
The whole lot of you should get lost. In reading
some of your comments about this good man, it's
no wonder your country is in such a mess!
17 - BIG GAY OWL
Bill V, dogmad!
18 - Cody Sparks
None of you now what the hell your talking about thats that
peace
19 - Susan Klopfer
While there are numerous asides to Mississippi's civil rights story, perhaps none are quite so compelling (and less known) as this: Seven years before JFK was assassinated, the magnolia state's Sen. James O. Eastland met for the first time with Guy Banister, a controversial CIA operative and retired FBI agent in charge of the Chicago bureau.
Banister -- remember him as the man who "pistol-whipped" David Ferrie in Oliver Stone's film "JFK" -- was later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald and Mississippi's senator through Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or SISS (sometimes called "SISSY").
The New Orleans Times-Picayune on March 23, 1956, reported that Robert Morrison, a former chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee or HUAC, and Banister traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to confer personally with Senator Eastland for more than three hours. Describing the conference as "completely satisfactory," Morrison told the reporter that "Mr. Banister has complete liaison with the committee's staff which was the main object of our trip."
Apparently cozying up to Eastland and "SISSY" was Banister's goal. And it worked.
Known as a notorious political extremist who was later described as the impetus for James Garrison’s 1967-1970 Kennedy assassination probe, Banister earlier became a brief focus of Mississippi's secret spy agency, the Sovereignty Commission, when it was suggested Banister should be hired to set up an "even tighter" domestic spying system throughout the state.
A second Eastland operative, private investigator John D. Sullivan of Vicksburg, made this suggestion to the commission just months after the JFK assassination, according to released Sovereignty Commission records.
Former FBI agent Sullivan had worked under Banister (both inside the FBI and privately) and as a private self-employed investigator who often did work for hire for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission; the private white Citizens Councils, of which he was an active member; and for SISS, as had Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald.
When Sullivan reportedly committed suicide following the assassination, Sovereignty Commission investigators tried to acquire his library and files, but most of his confidential files were either reportedly burned by his widow or they had been lent out, and she "could not remember" who had them, Sovereignty Commission files disclose.
Then some twenty-nine years later, in testimony before the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board during a Dallas hearing on November 18, 1994, the late Senator Eastland was directly implicated in the president’s assassination by one of the author/theorists invited to testify.
“Lee Harvey Oswald was quite possibly an agent of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and he was doing the bidding of [Sen. Thomas J.] Dodd and Eastland and Morrison,” author John McLaughlin swore.
Documentation that could support or even discredit such assertions could perhaps be present in the Eastland archives at the University of Mississippi, but no objective scholar has been allowed to search these archives since the day they arrived on campus. Instead, Eastland's records were managed for years by a former associate and devotee who followed the papers from Washington, D.C. to Oxford.
Finally in 2005, after an unsuccessful Freedom of Information Act or FOIA request by this author, a historian was hired to organize the archives based in the James O. Eastland School of Law at Ole Miss. But there would still be a waiting period before any of the files could be viewed, according to the school's dean.
The plan was to release first all press releases, according to the historian who also confirmed that “many important files" were probably missing -- that the files looked “cleaned out.”
(The Dean of the law school, when presented a FOIA for access to Eastland archives, asked while laughing if he could “just show the rejection letter written to the last person who asked for this information." Later it came back to this author that “people at Ole Miss were really angry” over the FOIA request.)
-------- Notes
[1] “Banister, FBI Chief Since February, to Leave Post Nov. 30,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov 19, 1954, Part 2, Page 12.
[2] Citation for this newspaper article (“NOTP, March 23, 1956, p. 1”) comes from the online Jerry P. Shinley Archive “Re: Jim Garrison and the SCEF Raids.”
[3] William Davy, “Let Justice Be Done,” (Jordan Publication, May 12, 1999), 1. On the weekend of the assassination, Banister pistol-whipped his employee Jack Martin, after Martin accused him of killing Kennedy. Martin eventually spoke to authorities. [4] Sovereignty Commission documents SCR ID 7-0-8-89-1-1-1 and SCR ID 2-56-1-20-1-1-1.
[5] Sovereignty Commission documents SCR ID 99-36-0-2-1-1-1 SCR ID 1-16-1-21-1-1-1, SCR ID 1-26-0-5-2-1-1, SCR ID 2-2-0-19-1-1-1, SCR ID 1-24-0-11-1-1-1
[6] After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, A. J. Weberman, a “Dylanologist,” “garbologist” and Kennedy conspiracist wrote that he received this communication from Sullivan's grandson, Jeremy Sullivan: "I was told that he committed suicide but my dad didn't think so. He told me there was an investigation and the FBI was involved. They deemed it suicide. The story I heard had changed depending on who told it, I believe that they had been out fishing all day and John Daniel had been drinking. After they got home, he was alone in his room and there was a gunshot, and he was found dead." Also, Weberman stated that Jim Garrison had an undisclosed case against Sullivan in 1961. Per a “Memo for the Director” by Betsy Palmer on April 19, 1978, regarding the “HSCA.” From A.J. Ajweberman and Michael Canfield, “Coup D'Etat in America, The CIA and the Assassination of John Kennedy,” (New York City, The Third Press, 1975) Nodule II.
[7] Online minutes of testimony before the Assassination Records Review Board, November 18, 1994. Dallas, Texas. Testimony of John McLaughlin aka John Bevilaqua, Harvard University graduate and systems analyst, also a Kennedy assassination theorist. McLaughlin was testifying why he needed to see documents from HUAC and SISS. He had also requested military records of Wycliff P. Draper, head of the Draper Committees and Pioneer Fund. Mississippi had been the benefactor of Draper money in its fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and in funding of private white academies per Sovereignty Commission reports.
[8] Eastland’s name has also been associated with the murder of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, U. S. Senator Robert Kennedy and with the mass murder at a U. S. Army base located in Mississippi of potentially 1,000 black soldiers during World War II.
[9] The former Eastland aid has since retired.
20 - Captain Joe
Over the years I have been puzzled about about a timing issue that I observed and I wonder how many other former soldiers observed on the day that JFK was assasinated. I was stationed in Germany with a nuclear missile unit near the Czech border. We were deployed on an alert at 6:30 PM on 11-22-63 right after the evening meal. After occupying our emergency firing position, perhaps 30 minutes after the alert was sounded, I went ahead and set up our perimeter defense with my squad,(I was the machine gun sergeant for the unit). After getting set up I wandered over to the communication truck to see what the heck was up. The communication truck had wireless teletype machines to monitor communications with our higher headquarters to receive orders etc. One of the machines was monitoring Associated Press, since the other one was monitoring headquarters. After a while, I heard a commotion, 5 dings in a row. The comm technicion hollared that there were shots fired in Dallas at the president. I believe that this flash message at the time, about 7:30 PM, was a contemporaneous report of the assasination, one hour after we were deployed to our emergency firing position with nuclear missiles. There is seven hour difference between Dallas and Germany. That means we were deployed one hour before the assasination. Someone in Washington was able to see the future. Any other reports of this early deployments?
21 - Leo Nard
Two weeks before Kennedy was shot, I bought at an army surplus store, a Manlicher carcano 6.5 rifle that turned out to be only four serial numbers away from the one that Oswqald supposedly used. I have shot this gun several times, and as an expert marksman, I can tell you that no one (in spite of what LBJ's FBI said, you cannot fire this weapon that fast looking though a scope and hit anything. It has a long bolt and you have to move your head each time you reloaad. It's just impossible....Sorry all you guys that think Oswald did this by himself.
22 - Benito Musolini
There's no way it was a Panda Bear, it was a Penguin..yes, a penguin in Dallas. They train those birds in sharp shooting you know. Theory #2, it was JFK from the Future, that came and shot himself to frame Oswald cause he's a jackass
23 - jeXXie
What's with #19 writing her own frickin' essay!?! Oh yeah, and I seriously doubt that either a panda, grizzley, penguin, or any other animal for that fact could have loaded a gun and shot JFK; most animals don't even have thumbs like us humans do. Grow up!
24 - Olivia Maxwell (Gundam Pilot)
Ok. Enough with the whole panda bear, grizzly bear, penguins, I don't care what animal, just stop it! We all know they aren't smart enough to pick up a gun, go to Dallas, and shoot the president from wherever it might have been (in the building, behind the fence, etc.). It was all a plot from the future. The Gundam Pilots can and blew him up, along with many other presidents. *laughs* Not really. If they had, I would be very excited because then I would go and greet them. Anyway, about all the theories... maybe (and this is just a thought) but maybe JFK wanted to die. O.o Maybe he wanted to commit suicide, but didn't have the balls to do it. I mean, which president REALLY did a good job of being the president? I agree. You shoot one president, you'll get another stupid politican in there to replace them, no problem. Man... we don't need any more Harvard schools. THAT'S WHERE ALL THESE STUPID ASS POLITIANS ARE COMING FROM!! Maybe we should bowb Harvard. *thinks about it* I'll go get Tenshi no Shiine later and maybe do that. *shakes head* But anyway, that was just a thought. I don't really know if that was the case. But, eh.
25 - David "wait for it" Jack off
Well, first off you guys are way off and should not own a computer or even be able to think.. Just sayin'.